Clearpath’s Blog on IT Infrastructure, Hybrid Clouds and IT Security

Most backup tools were built for the physical world and simply retrofitted for virtualization. Their roots are in the physical world, which results in complications in today’s virtual world. Veeam Backup and Replication was designed and built specifically for the virtualized datacenter. Veeam has a long list of great features for backup and recovery, such as:

Yesterday on day 2 of VMworld, I attended a deep dive session on Veeam Backup and Replication 7. With this announcement Veeam has included 2 major innovations, 7 new features, and 75 general enhancements. Veeam was already a top choice in my opinion for backing up your virtual environments. They are completely agentless, entirely virtualization focused, and they provide 26 restore options from a single backup.

Veeam is a pretty awesome tool for doing full VM and file-level backups of VMware vSphere VMs. Every once in a while, however, you might try to do a restore that is a bit out of the ordinary. One such scenario is when you want to do a full restore of the VMDK files (descriptor and flat) and then mounting the drive alongside the original disk on the original virtual machine. You might want to do this so you can compare files between the current copy and the restored VMDK. When you attempt to mount the restored VMDK, you will run into the following message upon reconfiguring the VM: